The Greek, touched by the simplicity and ingenuousness with which she spoke, gazed at her tenderly.
"Do not thank me," she continued. "It is I who should be grateful for the joy of feeding you. What is this? I know not. Never has a man approached me before without giving me something; some give me copper coins, others a piece of cloth or a patera of wine; most of them blows and bites; all have given me something, and I have accepted, though I detested them. But you, who come poor and hungry, who do not seek me but reject me, who give me nothing, just your being near me has made a new pleasure surge through my body. As I give you food I feel intoxicated, as if I were fresh from a banquet. Tell me, Greek, are you really a man, or are you the father of the gods, descending to earth to honor me?"
Exalted by her own words, she arose, standing half way up the marble steps, and extending her rigid arms toward the temple, bathed in moonlight, exclaimed:
"Aphrodite! My goddess! If some day I manage to get together the price of two white doves, I will present them on thy altar, adorned with flowers and fire-colored ribbons, in memory of this night."
The Greek drank the bitter liquid from the jar and offered it to the woman, whose lips sought the same spot on the rim which had been touched by his.
She did not taste the supper which the Greek held out to her; she continued drinking, and the wine made her more talkative.
"If you only knew what it has cost me to get all this! The lanes are full of drunken men, who wallow in the mire and drag themselves along on their hands, tearing one's clothing and biting one's legs. Wine runs out of the doorways of the inns. They were fighting on the wharf a little while ago. Some Africans were holding one of their companions head down in the water to cure his broken skull; a Celtiberian had opened a great gash in it with his clenched fist. Others amused themselves by catching Tuga, an Iberian girl, by the feet, and thrusting her head in the biggest vat in the tavern as long as they dared. She was half drowned when they pulled her out. It is their usual diversion. I saw poor Albura, a friend of mine, seated on the ground covered with blood, holding in the palm of her hand one of her eyes which a drunken Egyptian had knocked out with a fisticuff. This kind of thing happens every night! And yet, all at once, I have become afraid. I have only just met you, and still it seems to me as if I were living in a new world, and that for the first time I give heed to my surroundings."
She told him the story of her life. They called her Bacchis, and she was uncertain what was her native land. No doubt she was born in some other port, for she vaguely remembered in her childhood a long voyage in a ship. Her mother must have been a lupa also, and she herself the result of a meeting with a mariner. The name of Bacchis, which had been given her when she was little, had been borne by many famous courtesans of Greece. No doubt she had been sold to some old woman by the pilot who had brought her to Saguntum, and, while still a child, long before coming to maturity, was visited in the old woman's hut by aged merchants of the port or libertines of the city.
When her owner died she became a lupa, and passed into submission to mariners, fishermen, shepherds from the mountains, and to all the brutal horde which swarmed around the port. She was not yet twenty, but she was aged, disfigured, wasted by excesses and by blows. She had always seen the city from a distance. She had only entered it twice. The lupas were not tolerated there. They were allowed to remain near the fane of Aphrodite, as a guarantee of the security of Saguntum, that thus the rabble which came to the port from all lands might be held at a distance, but in the city the Iberians of cleanly habits became indignant at the mere sight of the wantons, and the corrupt Greeks were too refined in their tastes to feel pity for those sellers of the body who fell like beasts beside the roadway for a bunch of grapes or a handful of nuts.
There in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite she had spent her life, ever awaiting new ships and new men, hairy and obscene, brutal as satyrs, made ferocious by the abstinence of the sea, to be at last assassinated in some mariners' fight, or found the victim of hunger, dead beside some abandoned boat.